FILE PHOTO: OpenAI and ChatGPT logos are seen in this illustration taken, February 3, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
OpenAI’s ChatGPT service is back in action after a major 90-minute outage, during which its 100 million weekly active users were left in the lurch. The disruption occurred shortly before 9 AM ET / 6 AM PT / 2PM GMT and included a major outage that impacted the company’s API services as well. Users attempting to access ChatGPT during the outage got a response back stating, “ChatGPT is at capacity right now.”
According to OpenAI, “a fix has been implemented, and we are gradually seeing the services recover.” To prevent any further issues, OpenAI is closely monitoring the service, especially since this recent outage followed a partial outage affecting ChatGPT and API services for several hours the night before.
ChatGPT had enjoyed a smooth run without any significant problems for several months, making it one of the fastest-growing AI services. Just this week, the AI company said they now had 100 million weekly users, with over 2 million developers actively building on OpenAI’s API services suggesting growth. The company also announced some months ago that it had recorded an over $1b revenue for the first time and again suggesting that it has onboarded more paying customers. With customisable GPTs especially for businesses announced this week, the company could soon take off to become a Wall Street sweetheart. It was recently reported that some on Wall Street were beginning to question the whole AI hype saying it didn’t reflect in real world balance sheets, maybe OpenAI would finally change that. Besides this, they have a big brother in Microsoft which is the second largest company in the world by market cap. Anyway, back to the outage today.
This outage comes shortly after OpenAI’s first developer conference, where they introduced GPT-4 Turbo and the new ability for users to create their own customized versions of ChatGPT. This GPTs feature is exclusively available to paying ChatGPT Plus subscribers and OpenAI enterprise customers, enabling them to create internal versions of ChatGPT tailored to their employees’ needs.
